RecoverSaves / Reddit data request
The Reddit data request, and what actually arrives
It is the only way to get at saved posts past the roughly 1,000 the interface will show you. Here is how to file it, what lands in your inbox, and what the file is like when you open it — measured against a real request, not a description of one.
Filing it
- Sign in as the account whose saves you want, and open reddit.com/settings/data-request.
- Ask for your full account data. There is no "just my saved posts" option — saves come as part of the whole export.
- Submit. Reddit emails a download link to the address on the account when the archive is built.
- Unzip it and take out
saved_posts.csvandsaved_comments.csv.
How long it takes
Reddit's own guidance is broad: usually within 24–72 hours, and up to 30 days. That is a ceiling, not an estimate, and it is what most write-ups repeat.
Our one real measurement: about five hours. We filed a request on 2026-08-24 from a small account and the download link arrived the same day. That is a single data point from an account with 48 saved items, so treat it as evidence that the 24–72 hour figure is conservative rather than as a promise. A long-lived account with tens of thousands of items plausibly takes longer.
The practical read: file it, then get on with something else. It is not instant, and it is usually not days either.
What the saved-posts file actually looks like
Two columns. That is the whole file.
id,permalink 1vt0u4g,https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1vt0u4g/you_can_cover_your_faces_we_can_still_tell_youre/
| Property | What we measured |
|---|---|
| Header | Exactly id,permalink. No variations, no extra columns. |
| Line endings | CRLF, and no byte-order mark. Worth knowing if you are writing a parser — plenty of guides assume a BOM is there. |
id | The bare base-36 id. In saved_comments.csv it is the comment's own id, not the post's. |
| Posts vs comments | Two separate files. Our export held 42 rows in one and 6 in the other, matching what the account had saved exactly. |
| Content | None. No titles, no subreddits, no authors, no dates, no body text. |
The permalink often carries a lowercased, underscored fragment of the original title. It is tempting to treat that as the title; it is truncated, it loses punctuation and capitalisation, and on a comment permalink it belongs to the parent post rather than to the thing you saved. It is a routing artifact, not data. The full breakdown of the file's shape and edge cases covers what a parser has to survive.
Two things that make it worth requesting
It goes past the 1,000 the interface shows
This is the whole reason to bother. The export is compiled from Reddit's own records rather than from the saved page, so it contains everything, including the older items the saved list simply stops at. No amount of scrolling that page reaches them, and no tool that reads the page can either.
It keeps saves the author has since deleted
We tested this specifically, because it is the difference between a complete archive and a partial one. A post saved to the test account, then deleted by its author, was still present in the export — the row survives even though the post no longer resolves on Reddit. So the export tells you that you saved something, even when the something is gone. Whether you can recover its title afterwards is a separate question and the answer is often no, but the record of it existing is not lost.
Once you have the file
You have a list of links with no titles, which is honest but not readable. Turning it back into an archive means asking Reddit about each saved item to get its title, subreddit and date — which is what this extension does, through your own logged-in session, paced so it does not attract a rate limit.
Turn saved_posts.csv into something you can read. Feed it to the extension and it rebuilds titles, subreddits and dates, flags what was deleted or removed rather than dropping it, and shows the whole archive — including everything past the 1,000 the saved page hides. Counting your hidden saves is free.